Happy birthday, YouTube!

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YouTube, once a clearinghouse for kitten videos, has turned five this month. Yes, in May of 2005 YouTube.com launched to the public as a beta, after several months of testing and planning. And even though it seems like the video sharing site blipped on our collective radar yesterday, you ain’t seen nothing yet because Google has big plans for the web’s leading video destination.

Five years from now, you might not even remember getting feature films and the latest music on Netflix, Amazon, or iTunes because Google is cutting major deals with Hollywood studios and record labels at a staggering pace. Despite all those advancements, however, the average user spends fifteen minutes a day on YouTube, which is still just a fraction of the average five-hour session that couch potatoes spend watching television.

Yes, YouTube has a long way to go before it catches up with established content stores, but there’s no doubt that Google is serious about turning the site into a one-stop shop for all your entertainment needs. Celebrating the anniversary, the YouTube team wrote the following in a blog post:

Five years ago this month, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com with a simple mission: give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself.

In addition, YouTube has launched an all-new anniversary channel at www.youtube.com/fiveyear that combines an interactive world map of “My YouTube Story” user videos with an interactive timeline of the milestones and videos picked by a handful of “luminaries and celebrities,” as the company put it. They include Conan O’Brien, Pedro Almodovar, Katie Couric, and more.

Key YouTube milestones (click for larger).

The birthday party also coincided with another major milestone – YouTube now serves over two billion videos a day. To put that in perspective, that’s double the prime time audience of all three major US networks combined. Just last October YouTube was serving a billion videos a day and two months ago users were uploading a day’s worth of videos to YouTube each minute. Check out a cool video timeline included below that will remind you of their key milestones.

According to Google, premium content on YouTube now includes broadcasts of entire sports seasons live to over two hundred countries, documentaries, and feature films from Hollywood studios and independent filmmakers. In addition, the company wrote, YouTube “documents social unrests seeking to transform societies” and hosts interviews with leading political figures and parties.